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"There are a few main reasons to add a Google map to your website: It helps customers or website visitors get directions to your business and saves customers the steps of opening a new browser window, leaving your website, and finding directions. Customers can simply use the map on your website. Your business contact information is easy to find. The data an embedded Google Map provides is your business address, phone number, website, directions, reviews, and review stars. A Google map can highlight nearby points of interest, parking areas, restaurants, theaters, parks, etc. Visitors can reference nearby areas if they are not exactly sure where your business is located."

Oct 22, 2008 at 10:55am Eastern by Paul Bruemmer Two Ways To Justify SEO In Uncertain Times In House - A Column From Search Engine Land During uncertain economic times like these, our advice is to always stick with the fundamentals to maintain business efficiency and progress. No matter what your business model, performing the fundamentals will keep you on-track and in-line for leveraging future success. If the C-level executives in your company are having any doubts about the value of SEO and are hesitating to release more funding, it's time to perform a cost-benefit exercise. It's your job as an in-house SEO manager to reestablish their confidence in the value of SEO as well as your value and the value of your team. When funding gets in the way, having a narrow focus, putting it on the table, and describing company goals you are committed to are all very important. 1) Leverage Your Paid Search Data To demonstrate implicit value for SEO, start with a baseline. Show where your key terms currently rank in organic and multiply by the cost-per-click value. Run the numbers for the value of direct clicks with high search intent. One way to go about this is to calculate an Effective Cost-Per-Click (eCPC) for your organic listings: 1. Access the Keyword Tool within your Google AdWords account. 2. Type your best performing (for instance, 20) keywords. 3. Select descriptive words or phrases and synonyms. 4. Click Get Keyword Ideas. This will produce a report; select Exact within the "Match Type" field and click on Approx Avg Search Volume. 1. Look at the Cost-Per-Click column to acquire the CPC value (let's assume it's $2.00). 2. Go to your web analytics data and identify the number of organic clicks for these keywords (let's assume 20,000/month). 3. Multiply the two (CPC times the number of organic clicks (in this case $40,000/mo)). 4. Create a spreadsheet with your best performing keywords and make the statement, "if we

Marketing Has Become Personal (Again) When the Big Guys want to look like Small Players, they make deep investments, mostly in social media. If you look at Coca-Cola's Facebook Page, for example, it doesn't look remarkably different from any other Facebook Page, even those created by tiny companies. On that Facebook Page, Coca-Cola -- one of the largest companies in the world and possibly the most recognized brand on the globe -- is presenting itself as not just small but also personal and approachable. In fact, if you are a fan of its page, you can write on its wall. Coke has videos of its fans and simple pictures of people enjoying a Coke. These aren't professional, glossy images but the sort of pictures we've come to expect online: a bit grainy, not well lit, and very real looking. The rule, and indeed the opportunity, of the new medium is to make your marketing personal. You need a bit of guts to do it. We all have a natural tendency to speak and act in ways we feel are professional when doing business, and this is true online as well. But social media is the single most important media space for brands right now, and its nature is different. If you are a big brand, you don't need to pretend you are small, but you do need to find ways to become approachable, engaging, and personal in the way that small brands do. Let's Get Small There are a few rules to follow when you try to get more personal in your marketing. Use these methods and you can start putting some real faces next to the brands consumers think they know: * Start with the current fans.This is really the great story of the Coca-Cola page. It was started by two guys who simply loved Coke, not by company itself. They amassed a following of brand loyalists, totally on their own. The company came to these guys and asked for the opportunity to help them out and keep them involved. Exactly what you would do if you were an actual human being, not a great big company more concerned with protectin

Google's Local algorithm (the one that populates maps.google.com and helps populate the 10-pack, 3-pack, and Authoritative OneBox) counts links differently than its standard organic algorithm. \nIn the Local algorithm, links can still bring direct traffic from the people who click on them. But the difference is that these "links" aren't always links; sometimes they're just an address and phone number associated with a particular business! In the Local algorithm, these references aren't necessarily a "vote" for a particular business, but they serve to validate that business exists at a particular location, and in that sense, they make a business more relevant for a particular search.

Oct 22, 2008 at 7:13pm Eastern by Greg Sterling Relying On Print Yellow Pages? Most Local Customers Turn To The Web! Online marketers have been predicting the death of print yellow pages for years. While that will never happen, print yellow pages are no longer the primary way that people seek local information. In fact, the internet collectively - through search engines, local search sites, online yellow pages and other venues - is the top way consumers look for local information. A new study underscores this change and documents with hard numbers why local advertisers have to take the internet into account when trying to reach customers. The study The shift from print to web was captured by advertising agency TMP Directional Marketing, which commissioned comScore to perform a study in May 2007 about local search user behavior - online and off. The stated purpose was to "understand the use and value of on- and offline local search sources," including Internet yellow pages, print yellow pages and search engines. That study involved behavioral observations and survey responses from 3,000 members of comScore's US consumer panel. TMP followed up that original study with a second one this year, in July 2008. The results were released late last week. This overview compares the topline findings from the previous study and those just published. Internet now 'primary' local information source When asked about their "primary" source for location business information, here's how survey respondents answered: In the 2007 findings, print yellow pages were the single, leading source for local business information. However the internet, in the aggregate, was used as a primary tool by almost twice as many respondents. In the 2008 survey, search engines (e.g., Google) have pulled ahead of print yellow pages, while internet yellow pages (e.g., Yellowpages.com) saw growth and local search sites (e.g., Google Maps, Yahoo Local) experienced a slight usage

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According to Atkinson, three to four minutes is the "sweet spot" time needed to keep customers engaged without overwhelming them with too many pages and products. SumAll reported that 169 seconds was the average amount of time spent per site visit this year and that 1.54 minutes was the amount of time consumers needed to spend in order for e-tailers to make a buck.